Separating Fact From Rumors – The Xbox One
There’s been a lot of confusion on policies, features, and games surrounding the Xbox One. Regardless of what’s rumor and what’s fact, there shouldn’t be mass confusion in the first place. Still, here’s a handy guide that you can reference that will contain facts on the Xbox One. Feel free to comment below with more misconceptions, facts, or questions. I will update it as information becomes available.
Used Games
Playing used games on the Xbox One has become a touchy subject. You can’t go far into looking up information on the console without running into comments on the subject. Many believe that there will be a fee to play used games on your Xbox One console, even if you take your game to play on a friends console. This is not the case. Over the past few days, numerous scenarios have been proposed, most of which lead to the conclusion of a used game fee. As of right now, the most important statement on the matter comes from Larry Hryb’s (Xbox Live’s Major Nelson) latest statement:
“We know there is some confusion around used games on Xbox One and wanted to provide a bit of clarification on exactly what we’ve confirmed today. While there have been many potential scenarios discussed, today we have only confirmed that we designed Xbox One to enable our customers to trade in and resell games at retail.
Beyond that, we have not confirmed any specific scenarios.
Another piece of clarification around playing games at a friend’s house – should you choose to play your game at your friend’s house, there is no fee to play that game while you are signed in to your profile.”
With that, it confirms that I can take my copy of Madden 25 to play at friend’s house, free of charge. Stay tuned for more information.
Region Restricted
Just as the Xbox 360, the Xbox One will be region locked. This isn’t surprising and shouldn’t a hassle unless you’re really into traveling or importing games. The Xbox One is simply following suit with their partners in the movie and music industry to join an already wide array of products that are region locked.
Always Online
The Xbox One will not be required to always be connected to the Internet or Xbox Live, however, there is one possible scenario that would require the console to connect to the internet at least once a day. This has not been confirmed to be the end all be all. More information should be available at a later date.
Kinect & Always On
Yes, each Xbox One will come bundled with a Kinect sensor. This sensor is a step up from what is available now as it can track movements, heart beats, and can power the console on with a simple voice command. This lead to gamers fearing that the Kinect would always be on and would violate their privacy. This is not the case as the Xbox One and Kinect can be turned off altogether. However, in order to power the console on with a voice command, the console and Kinect must be in a low-power state, and not exactly off. But if you’re like me, you’ll probably turn the whole thing off to save electricity. (Note: I’m not going green, I’m just a college student with no money.)
Source: NY Times
Games
Microsoft took a lot of heat for not focusing on video games during the Xbox One reveal. What many failed to realize is E3 is just two weeks away and Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal was just that. There was a quick note that there are 15 Exclusive Xbox One games to be released in the first year, with 8 of them being new franchises. Below some of confirmed and uncomfirmed Xbox One Games:
Battlefield 4
Call of Duty: Ghosts
Destiny
Dying Light
FIFA 14
Forza Motorsport 5
Madden 25
Need for Speed Rivals
Quantum Break
Ryse
Theif
Unconfirmed titles are as follows:
Halo 5
Rare “Historic” Franchise – Possibly Banjo Kazooie or Perfect Dark
The Evil Within
Dragon Age III: Inquisition
The Witcher 3
Rainbow 6: Patriots
The list goes on and will be updated in a separate article.
Xbox Live
Of the biggest bits of news to come out of Xbox Live was the confirmation that gamerscores would carry over and the friends list cap would be bumped up to 1,000. What many don’t know are the number of servers that will be dedicated to the Xbox One. Microsoft plans on having 300,000 servers dedicated to the console. How will this affect those who don’t use the Cloud? Well, the typical 16 player multiplayer matches can now be bumped up to 128 active players.
Backwards Compatibility
The Xbox One will not be backwards compatible. Is it annoying for us consumers? Yes. But as with every new advancement in products that rely heavily on tech, we must move forward. The reason Xbox One isn’t backwards compatible is simply because the hardware is different. The new x86 chip does not allow a native conversion for 360 games to be played on the Xbox One. Here’s the official statement from Microsoft:
“Xbox One hardware is not compatible with Xbox 360 games, … We designed Xbox One to play an entirely new generation of games—games that are architected to take full advantage of state-of-the-art processors and the infinite power of the cloud. We care very much about the investment people have made in Xbox 360 and will continue to support it with a pipeline of new games and new apps well into the future.”
From that, we can assume the 360 will be around for the near future and won’t be completely axed like the original Xbox was. Does anyone remember Call of Duty 2: Big Red One? Ugh.
Specs
There hasn’t been much information regarding the Xbox One’s specs, other than what was shown on the day of its reveal:
Some believe the Xbox One is underpowered, or hampered by running three OS’ at the same time. Not so, says Jeff Henshaw, Program Manager at Microsoft:
“We’re provisioning for developers for every physical Xbox One we build, we’re provisioning the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox Ones on the cloud. We’re doing that flat out so that any game developer can assume that there’s roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game, so they can build bigger, persistent levels that are more inclusive for players. They can do that out of the gate.”
If you’re not familiar with the Cloud on the Xbox One, let me reiterate that it will be powered by 300,000 servers. Microsoft plans to offload some of the heavy lifting in games onto the Cloud to make gameplay more fluid. Here’s another example from General Manager of Redmond Game Studios and Platforms Matt Booty regarding latency-sensitive issues in video games:
“Things that I would call latency-sensitive would be reactions to animations in a shooter, reactions to hits and shots in a racing game, reactions to collisions. Those things you need to have happen immediately and on frame and in sync with your controller. There are some things in a video game world, though, that don’t necessarily need to be updated every frame or don’t change that much in reaction to what’s going on.
One example of that might be lighting. Let’s say you’re looking at a forest scene and you need to calculate the light coming through the trees, or you’re going through a battlefield and have very dense volumetric fog that’s hugging the terrain. Those things often involve some complicated up-front calculations when you enter that world, but they don’t necessarily have to be updated every frame. Those are perfect candidates for the console to offload that to the cloud—the cloud can do the heavy lifting, because you’ve got the ability to throw multiple devices at the problem in the cloud.”
Booty goes onto say, “A rule of thumb we like to use is that [for] every Xbox One available in your living room we’ll have three of those devices in the cloud available.” Beyond that, nothing has been fully laid out by Microsoft. I suspect we won’t be able to do a full console comparison until after E3 2013.
Source: Arstechnica
As stated above, if you have any questions or contributions, please comment below.
